Vocabulary

I spoke with Anastasia on the phone and ended up feeling kind of horny and eager but also unfulfilled, but playful at the same time. I can't describe it very well in words.

Anyway, went out feeling that way and sort of browsed books randomly at Beyond Words, BW Design, and Fruitmarket but failed to find anything either intellectually stimulating or provocative in a kind of positive way. There was a book by women photographers that was OK erotica, and one by Jan Saudek that was provocative in his mixed, ambivalent way, but nothing that's both interesting and, you know, positive, empowering, whatever is the word for it.

I went to Jenners and was browsing their shitty fashions with contempt (why do men buy shirts that look like 70's rejects) when I bumped into the crutch of a man who turned out to have one leg. But the brief encounter didn't have the sort of indescribable awkwardness that one might imagine. Then all of a sudden dimitra appeared next to me looking attractive in a kind of shiny and satisfied way. We exchanged compliments and vague, well known but hard to pin down frustrations.

I completely failed to get to the Radical Book Fair on time. Walking west through Princess Street, I could feel my libido being crushed relentlessly by the sort of stifling, pervasive mundaneness of the street. Fearing spiritual death, I hid first in Waterstones, which sold a carefully recuperated blend of corporatism and world-wide openness, and then in HMV that was full of some invisible but palpable sense that YOU ARE A DUMMY CUSTOMER. So I ran out through the back of St. John's church, which is sound in a way that churches usually aren't and I can't find the right word for.

Went into the Filmhouse, which wasn't full of pretty and colourful Spanish people, so I spontaneously decided to go in and see Full Frontal, a sort of bizarre, academic essay of a film composed of random sequences and recursive half-narratives, different grains and textures of film, and an overwhelming sense and texture of America, California, Los Angeles, more real than anything else in the film (or indeed most films) in a way that I can't describe but would make sense if you'd travelled there on business.

Still in a funny mood of perceiving the world as poetry, I had some perfectly nice food in Ndebele, trying very hard to neither stare at the very attractive girl nearby along the table nor listen to their personal conversations. Wondered a bit about the unjustified awkwardness of strangers, at least when you fancy them, and went to look at the unreal, pointy Barclay Church, one of the most fabulous buildings in Edinburgh. Crossed the park while being apparently stalked by golf balls and decided that I like trees not just for their greenness, or branchiness, or their shadiness, but also for their size. They are like, well, BIG branchy and shady green things. The spire of the church appeared like a dreamy, pointy, floating thing as parallax made it slide over the lesser points of the rooftops and the tops of the trees.

Still mellow and flirty and feeling open, I passed the site of the terrible building that once used to house the city's major civil court and punk bar and went to Favorit, where I ran into Mercy, who I keep running into strangely. We had a conversation at once awkward and more friendly than our limited, shallow encounters would seem to justify. I went away thinking about the concept of two people who meet in an environment where they are both sort of visitors, as a kind of side aspect of their lives, if that makes sense.

Now wondering whether to go to Ascension and be shallow but social, or stay in and just write more stuff about emotions. I like writing about emotions, but if only I knew more good words......